Field of the Invention
This invention relates to apparatus and methods for managing search-engine-optimization content in web pages.
Background of the Invention
Many shoppers begin their search for a product using a preferred search engine, such as Google, to return a list of relevant websites. Shoppers may then browse through the first few pages of websites in the list to learn about the product, possibly resulting in a purchase. Because of this commonly-used approach to shopping, search engine optimization (SEO) is extremely important to increase page ranking and ensure that a website shows up in the first few pages of the search results. When search engines analyze web pages to determine ranking, they typically focus on specific web page elements referred to as “SEO content fields.” These SEO content fields include, for example, Page Title, Meta Description, Meta Keyword, and Image Alternate Description fields.
It is important to effectively manage content in SEO content fields to influence search engine optimization and page ranking. This can be challenging since online retailers may have thousands or even millions of products and web pages. The catalog structure for an online retailer's products can be very complex. Each category or sub-category may contain many products. Each product may contain many items with specific attributes (e.g., color and/or size). A single product may belong to multiple categories.
To add another dimension to the complexity, some online retailers may have multiple online sites that target different shoppers. Some products may be shared by the multiple sites. Other products (such as local products) may only reside on a single site or a subset of the multiple sites. Such sites are often referred to as “extended sites.” Managing the SEO content of extended sites can be challenging due to the complexity involved.
Currently, there are several approaches for managing SEO content in web pages. One approach is for business objects to have specific database fields that can be populated with SEO content. A drawback of this approach is that if an online retailer has thousands or millions of items/products, it is difficult to provide SEO content for each item/product. For example, the page title for a product may use the pattern “product name” at “store name” (e.g., White Arm Chair at StoreX). However, the retailer may not want all items, products, or categories to share this pattern. For example, the retailer may want products that are under promotion to have a different page title pattern. Using the approach described above, SEO content fields need to be provided for each product, resulting in undesired performance overhead.
Another approach is to populate the SEO content fields of web pages using properties file messages. This approach has the drawback that it tightly couples SEO content fields with web pages. There is no flexibility to have different content or patterns for specific groups of items/products/categories. Another disadvantage of this approach is that it does not allow business users to freely modify the content in SEO content fields to influence page rank. IT developers are typically needed to effectuate the desired changes. Each time IT developers make changes, regression testing needs to be performed to ensure that the changes did not introduce other problems.
Both of the approaches discussed above have drawbacks with respect to extended sites. For example, a product or group of products may be shared by two extended sites, but may use a different page title pattern on each extended site. A retailer may want some extended sites to share some or all of the SEO content patterns of other extended sites, while wanting other extended sites not to do so. Both approaches discussed above are unable to handle this dimension of complexity.
In view of the foregoing, what are needed are apparatus and methods to more efficiently manage SEO content in web pages. Ideally, such apparatus and methods will be capable of handling the additional complexity inherent in extended sites environments.